Honeybee
by This is My Truth Tell Me Yours
Summary: A small child wants to pet Fawkes... A fluffy little onshot about Luna as a little girl and Dumbledore's friendship with her mother, Pandora.


**Disclaimer:** The ideas are mine, he characters belong to J.K.

* * *

 _"I am listening to hear where you are"_  
 ** _Neutral Milk Hotel_**

* * *

"I can trust that you won't talk about this to anyone?" Dumbledore asked, watching the young woman with his bright blue eyes.

"Of course," Pandora said simply, smiling at the old wizard and taking the cloak in her hands. She looked so much like her grandmother when she smiled, and with that simple gesture, Dumbledore's heart was put at ease, and Fawkes, who had been elegantly perched on the tall back rest of Dumbledore's chair, let out a very low, very melodious chirp, almost as if the mythical bird could share in its companion's relief. Albus himself barely acknowledge the sound, absorbed as he was by watching the young woman sitting next to him. Pandora admired the object he had handled her, following the patterns embroidered in the fabric with her long, thin fingers.

"It is exquisite," Pandora said, finally, bringing the silvery grey cloak to her face, as though she expected it to smell like perfume.

Albus smiled. It was just like Pandora to be curious about the scent of the magical object in her hands. Most wizards would lust after the rare and valuable object laying in gleaming folds in Pandora's lap. In fact, most would have been so distracted by their own desire, that they never would have thought about the scent of the cloth. That was precisely why Dumbledore had chosen to show her the cloak. He knew she would be able to appreciate the object for what it was, rather than for what it could do for her.

She seemed disappointed when she couldn't smell anything. It seemed only fitting to the young witch that such a beautiful cloth should smell like flowers or rain, or something else that was good and beautiful. Albus thought that was funny. The headmaster was well acquainted with the owner of that object. He had a very good idea of what kind of uses that cloak had been put to at Hogwarts, so he expected any flowery fragrance, if ever such a scent existed, to have vanished long ago.

"Are you sure it is a Hallow, Professor?" Pandora asked, looking up at Dumbledore and awakening him from his musings.

"My darling girl," he said, "surely you can remember I have asked you to call me Albus, no?"

Pandora blushed slightly and smiled. To call Professor Dumbledore by his first name was simply odd, even if she had been out of Hogwarts for several years.

"But to answer your question," the old man continued, sipping some of his tea, "yes, I think I have gathered reasonably firm evidence to substantiate my claim. I would be glad to have your opinion of course. I did use one of your spells to determine its age."

"Did you?" the young woman smiled again, unable to hide her pride that a wizard as powerful as Dumbledore had found use for a spell of her own invention. Pandora loved to experiment with spells, but she seldom thought they might be of use to anyone but herself. Almost immediately, she picked up her wand and, pointing at the cloak in her hands, murmuring incantations that sounded like an old poem recited around a fire. She let out a small gasp at some point, "it is so old!"

"Yes, immensely old," Dumbledore agreed, sipping his tea again, and holding the mug in his hands for warmth, "and yet it does not seem to have been worn out by time or spells or anything else that might have been spilled over it. As far as I call tell, it completely shields the wearer from human eyes."

"Well, there's one thing that points against it being a hallow, though, isn't there?" Pandora asked softly, the shadow of a smile on the corner of her lips.

"Is there?" Dumbledore asked, interested.

"Well," the which answered, "it seems too beautiful to have been crafted by Death, doesn't it."

Dumbledore laughed.

"Indeed," the old wizard said.

"You know," she continued, before turning her attention back to the fluid cloak on her lap, "Xenophilius actually believes the Tale of the Three Brothers is literal. He thinks it was actually Death who created the Hallows."

Dumbledore nodded, but he did not say anything. He did not approve of her marriage to Xenophilius Lovegood. He had nothing against the man personally, but he couldn't stop thinking that Lovegood, with his reclusive nature and his well-known eccentricities, was simply not good enough for Pandora.

She had not had much choice on the matter, as he recalled. Pandora's mother had died before the girl finished school, and she was left under the sole custody of her father. He was not an evil man, but he was certainly very stern and he did have strong beliefs about the importance of blood purity. If anyone asked, he would never say muggle borns deserved to be shut out of Wizarding society, and he had certainly never aligned himself with the Death Eaters during the first war, but he'd sooner die than see his only daughter married to a mudblood. At the same time, he saw an unmarried daughter who was already finished with school as an obligation he should carry out at the earliest opportunity.

He arranged Pandora's marriage with a much older man, whose only recommending quality was the status of his blood. Xenophilus was a little eccentric, perhaps, but no one seemed to know him really well back then, and he did come from a long line of Ravenclaw wizards.

With that, barely a few months after she was done with school, Pandora became Mrs Lovegood.

Dumbledore remembered Xenophilius time at Hogwarts. His years at the school were marked by a variety of incidents, most of which had something to do with his own gullibility. Xenophilius' readiness to believe anything and everything made him a danger to himself and to those arround him. Once, when he was in Hogwarts he spent weeks in the infirmary recovering from a poisoning incident because another boy sold him some venomous tentacles and he touched them without gloves, believing it to be a bow of Moon Frogs' tongues. Later that same year he decided to search for Crumple-Horned Snorkacks in the Forbodden Forest, and was attacked by a young Acromantula. If it had been fully grown, he would have died. The incident, however, did not stop Xeno from entering the forest again, in his search for those Snorkacks, although he did bring an antidote for Acromantula's venom that second time.

From what Dumbledore had heard, Xenophilius had not grown into a much wiser man than he had been as boy.

He worried about Pandora marrying such a man, and he did offer to intervene, but she asked him not to do anything. Xenophilius was a good man, she said, and he had an open mind.

 _An o_ _pen mind. That was a way of putting it,_ Dumbledore thought sarcastically, but Pandora was adamant that he wasn't to interfere. She did not want to disrespect her father's wishes, or so she claimed. Albus knew there was more to it than that. He knew she was a very lonely young woman, who had never believed she was particularly pretty. In her heart, she doubted she would be able to find a husband herself, and, although she wouldn't speak of it, secretly Pandora wanted very much to have a child.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Dumbledore remembered asking.

"Yes," she answered simply, trying to demonstrate more courage than she felt at the time.

Xenophilius turned out to be a good husband. They barely knew each other before the short engagement, but he had fallen in love with her, and he respected his young wife very much. Never once had he hurt her or raised his voice to Pandora, and although he didn't demonstrate any interest in joining the order of the Phoenix, he didn't join the other side either.

Be that as it may, his unique personality did have repercussions to Pandora's life. Although they settled in Ottery St. Catchpole, one of those small towns in which wizards had settled in relatively large numbers after the passing of the Statute of Secrecy, Xenophilius never spent much time getting to know his neighbours. Perhaps because his good nature had been abused of so often when he was at school, Xenophilius had grown into a shy and misantropic man, who spent most of his time absorbed by his own private projects and "inventions". He was never impolite, but he didn't seek the company of others either, nor did he seem to suffer for not having any friends.

Not that Xenophilius' marriage hadn't changed him. It was undeniable that Pandora did him good. He became more confident in his own ideas and theories and after a few months he published the first issue of his magazine, _The Quibbler_. Unfortunately, that publication made himself even more of a joke in the Wizarding World.

That did not however, diminish Xenophilius' desire to make his ideas public. He dedicated most of his time to the magazine. It was not rare that Xenophilius would give his wife a kiss in the morning, and retire to his study, leaving Pandora all by herself in that oddly shaped house the entire day. She was often lonely, and the young woman valued Dumbledore's visits, whenever they took place.

Albus Dumbledore had been headmaster of Hogwarts for the entire duration of Pandora's studies there, but he had never really noticed the girl until her seventh year. She caught his eye during the winter ball traditionally thrown by elder students. The symbol of the Deathly Hallows glistened from the slave earrings she was wearing that night.

It was the first time he looked closely at that girl and something about her was oddly familiar. Intrigued, the headmaster asked her about that symbol, as though he knew nothing about it himself, and the girl explained about the Hallows, about how the symbol was worn by those who wished to identify themselves to other believers in the hope to find companions for the Quest. She seemed genuinely disappointed that none of her colleagues seemed to recognize the symbol at all.

It didn't take long for Dumbledore to realize why she looked so familiar. Her grandmother had been one of his closest friends when he was younger than Pandora was now.

Albus had always been short on friends when he was at Hogwarts, on account of what had happened to his father, but Athena didn't seem to judge him based on the rumours that circled around Hogwarts. Never once had she asked him to confirm or deny any of the stories about his family. Nobody else had ever respected him so.

Albus remembered one day, at dusk, when the two of them had been studying together by the lake. They sat under Albus' favourite oak tree, and took turns reading chapters of _A History of Magic_ to each other. After a while, they took a break, and Albus lay his head on Athena's lap, pointing his wand towards the wind and using non verbal spells to produce rings of smoke, shaped like increasingly more elaborate geometrical forms. Athena watched the boy, her delicate fingers fiddling with his auburn hair. He didn't seem to mind that. In fact, Albus seemed to enjoy it a little. Every once in a while she would use her own wand to conjure a bird or a butterfly that flew through Albus' smoky rings and continued towards the Forest. Athena and Albus had been quiet at that for a while when the girl broke the silence.

"You look sad," she said. It was not a question.

Albus pondered on whether or not he should ask the question that had been intruding upon his thoughts for the past few minutes.

"People have been talking about us, you know? They have been saying things about you because you're friends with me. Bad things."

"Humm," the girl mumbled.

"I don't want to be-" he started, and for a moment he didn't know how to continue, "I don't to be the reason why people treat you that way. I hate the things they say," he said, and before she could say anything, he continued, "and the thing is, they may have been right, I mean, you know the things people say about me, you know the stories about my father, don't you? You have never asked me about that, you have never asked me if it's true, or if- And now people are talking..."

Albus blinked heavily. He seemed to have an enormous weight on his shoulders. Athena on the other hand seemed very calm. She went on playing with his hair for a minute before she answered.

"I know that people talk about your family and about you," she said finally, "but the things I want to know about you are the things you wish to tell me. Anything else is an invasion of privacy. I wouldn't be a very good friend if I did that, would I?"

Albus looked her in the eye for a moment. He had never known anybody quite like her. Then he reached out to hold her hand and squeezed it between his fingers.

Athena had passed away no longer after they graduated, but meeting her granddaughter brought a breath of joy into Albus' life.

Pandora looked just like her grandmother when she was that age. Tall and lean, with waist long blonde hair and pale eyebrows. She was beautiful, in an unconventional way. Like her grandmother she was a Ravenclaw, and like her grandmother she had some trouble making friends, through no fault of her own. Pandora was intelligent and inquisitive, but quiet, and perhaps a little too shy for her own good.

Dumbledore and her became unlikely friends. Perhaps because he had been so close to her grandmother, Dumbledore he felt a responsibility to watch over the girl. She didn't have many people looking after her, after all, and he did enjoy her company. Pandora became a Historian with a fondness for inventing spells, and Dumbledore was happy to be the first to read her papers and offer his insight before she sent them to the Wizarding publications of the day. They met each other quite often, to talk about the Deathly Hallows and compare notes on their own reconstructions of the bloody path of the Elder wand through the ages.

Pandora looked sad the last time he visited, so he decided to show her the Invisibility Cloak he had borrowed from its legitimate owner. It had been with him for a while now, and he knew he could trust her to keep the secret. Besides, it would probably cheer her up.

Dumbledore had been distracted, thinking of how much she looked like her grandmother when she smiled, when Pandora spoke, awakening from his musings again.

"Do you suppose I could try it?" She asked, and when Dumbledore nodded she stood up, and threw the cloak over her shoulders, covering her white dress.

Only her head was visible now, floating at several feet from the floor.

"Oh!" Luna exclaimed, and both Dumbledore and her mother turned their heads to look at the little girl on the floor.

Luna had been playing with a toy hypogriff on the rug while the adults talked. Neither of them was paying much attention to the little girl, nor did they notice when Fawkes, the phoenix, flew away from Dumbledore's chair, only to land on the floor, where Luna stroked his feathers lightly, admiring the red and orange of the bird. She only lifted her head when her mother's body disappeared, and now she smiled, amazed at the magic before her eyes.

Both Dumbledore and Pandora were smiling as well.

"Let's put it to the test, shall we?" Pandora asked, turning to face Dumbledore again. "Perform your best invisibility spell, and I will wear the cloak and we can ask Luna if she can see us."

Dumbledore smile. He didn't see the point of that exercise actually, but he did stand up and with a gesture of his wand, became invisible. At the same time, Pandora covered her head with the cloak.

Luna seemed intrigued. She could not see any of them.

"Mummy?"

"Can you see mummy, honeybee?" Her mother's invisible voice asked.

Luna crawled to where Professor Dumbledore had been standing and extended her hands in the air, trying to catch his invisible leg. At some point, her tiny hands caught his robes and she gave it a little tug, but nothing happened… Then the little girl stood up and awkwardly walked towards the place where her mother had been standing.

Both Dumbledore and Pandora watched her quietly. Luna stumbled on her mother's invisible body and fell back, but she didn't cry. Instead she stood up again and looked for her mother with her hands, the same way she had looked for Dumbledore before. Then something unexpected happened. When she finally found the cloak, the little girl pull it open, and sneaked inside, becoming invisible too.

Dumbledore was so surprised he let go of his own invisibility spell and became visible again. It had never occurred to him that that was the true magic of the cloak: that it could hide others, as well as yourself.

But before anybody could say anything, the phoenix on the ground let out a little chirp, looking at the place where Luna had disappeared.

The little blonde girl got rid of the cloack a second before her mother pulled it out of her shoulders, and walked to the phoenix again, caressing the soft plumage of the bird. Dumbledore had never seen his phoenix behave like that.

"I think Luna wants to pet Fawkes," Pandora said, laughing as the two adults watched the little girl.

"Oh, could I?" asked the girl seated on the floor, looking up at Dumbledore. The headmaster smiled. She was an extraordinary little girl.

Before anybody could say anything, Fawkes lay its head on Luna's lap.

* * *

 _ **Author's Note:** I wrote this for the **Ultimate Battle Competition** (Angel Wings: A small child wants to pet Fawkes) and the **Greek Mythology Mega Prompt Challenge** (Pandora). The Angel Wings prompt was actually what inspired this fic, but once I started writing I just had to go into more detail about why Dumbledore would be friends with Pandora to begin with... My thanks to the incredible reviewers who helped wit the spelling and grammar mishaps this one-shot had. _

_I love that Luna's mum is called Pandora. It's just so fitting. It sucks that ff. net still has her listed simply as Mrs. Lovegood ._

 _I know it's not an obvious conection, but the song that opens the story actually inspired me when I was writing... That's why it's there_

 _I was aiming for a sweet little story. Do you think I made it? Please review..._


End file.
